Tuesday, November 13, 2012

30 Days of Blogging. Day 13, language funnies....

So, in preparing for language class the other day I pulled out an old handout from a class a few years ago. It's a great little handout that describes all sorts of verbs and motion-verbs, you know, stuff like "When I approached the corner, I stopped and wanted to take a smoke, but it turned out I didn't have any cigarettes. Immediately across the street was a small store so I left the sidewalk to cross the street but in the street was a large puddle that I had to go around since it had rained the night before...."

Ok... all of that is in Russian, right? There are several words in the dialogue that I don't understand, right?

Well, apparently I had translated part of it in the past to help me understand what was going on, right? The guy had to go around a big puddle, right?

So yesterday I'm reviewing this handout, having long since forgotten that this one word meant "puddle".

My handwriting, in any language, is terrible. So as I'm reviewing the handout, my translation looks like poodle, not puddle.

It took me several minutes to figure out what was going on. It was downright perplexing to me that there was a poodle so big in the middle of the road that the guy had to walk around it it and I couldn't figure out what the rain had to do with it.

About Me

Once upon a time I was a Student Minister. Before that I was a Wildlife Biologist-type guy. I served 2 churches for 15+ years in Mississippi. I married my best friend and then lost her after 9 years to Cystic Fibrosis. Being an Uncle has been my favorite job to date. My heart is to learn Russian and live in Ukraine and work with students and orphans and volunteers.
I work with International Teams in Ukraine, bringing people together to help the oppressed.